How to Earn 5-Star Reviews for Your Non-Perfect Property EVERYTIME

we all wish we had the most amazing property imaginable right some of us do but we don't all have that luxury sometimes there's issues with our property but that doesn't mean we can't still earn five-star reviews every time this week I want to break down five things you can do to make sure that your non-perfect property earns five star reviews every time stay tuned welcome to short-term rental riches we'll discuss investing in real estate but with a specific focus on short-term rentals quick actionable items to

acquire manage and scale your portfolio I'm your host Tim Hubbard yeah welcome back to the short-term rental Rich's podcast I just got back from a wedding in Miami I got on a plane from Southern Brazil and headed up north and I gotta say every time I leave Brazil to head to the U.S especially down here in southern Brazil it just reminds me how big this country really is so quite the Journey Back to the US but weddings are always a great time aren't they so it

was really good to be back there for a few days and I always enjoy coming back to Brazil too so during my stay there in Miami I rented in Airbnb and I want to talk about this week because that property was not perfect by no means was it perfect but the hosts earned a five-star review and based off her prior reviews she's been earning five star reviews with basically everyone hundreds and so I want to break down five things things that we can all be doing

every time to make sure that we earn five star reviews even if we don't have a perfect property before we get into that though if you've missed our past episodes go back and make sure you check them out we have Jason Hartman on it last week who's someone that I've been following his research for a long time he is an expert in the space he's an expert in macroeconomics and really helping us figure out if a market is risky and why it's risky so check out

our the podcast last week or the YouTube channel if you're tuning in there where we had an interview with Jason Hartman packed packed full of of great stuff okay let's get into it so the first step to make sure that we're always earning five star reviews even if our property is not perfect is to make sure we have an accurate and honest listing now you know if you've been listening to podcasts for a while that we've talked about this before but we have to set the

right expectations we're not going to be able to earn a five-star review if we leave out some issue or something that a guest is going to discover when they show up to the property that they didn't already know about so we got to make sure that the listing is as detailed as possible we've got to fill out all the sections and if there's something that your guest is going to see and they're not going to like well you need to make sure that they're aware of

that and sometimes that requires putting a picture in the listing doesn't mean you have to make it the first picture but let's just say your parking situation is not ideal for example maybe it's around the block or it's it's not right next to the property or it's in a driveway that just doesn't look that great well you still need to take a picture of it to let your guests know because they're going to see it either way right so that's the first thing we got to

make sure that our properties are perfectly portrayed online so there's no negative surprises when the guest shows up I've mentioned before that I've actually put slightly less appealing pictures on some of my properties to start off with just to set the expectations a little lower I know that sounds crazy but a little darker image of the living room if someone shows up and it's full of natural light well that's going to be a pleasant surprise right and that's an easy way to start off on the

right foot with your guest experience so the second piece to making sure that we always get five star reviews with our properties even if they're not perfect is our communication communication is key that is the name of the game and hospitality and know as much as I would like to a lot of times we can't automate everything we need to have some personalized communication I gave an example in an earlier episode where a lot of us are automating our check-in instructions and our checkout instructions for

example a lot of us are automating a welcome message but the problem with automating all those is that let's say you automated your welcome message to go in at 5 pm and your check-in time was 3 P.M but your guest didn't actually show up till 9 00 PM their plane got delayed or travel plans or whatever it happened to be and you've already sent them a message saying hey I hope you checked in okay that doesn't look good right in this very obvious that that came

from a machine it came from automation so make sure that your communication is on par one thing that my host did on this recent trip for example is she communicated with me right before I actually got to the property I told her what time I was going to be there she said hey I left the door unlocked for you this happened to be a guest house in the back and uh and then she did the same thing before I left so she had very pleasant communication

and this wasn't in person by the way this was through text message but she had very pleasant communication right before I checked in right before I actually checked in and right as I checked out and I gotta say she made the communication process and the check-in super super easy which I was very grateful for because it is a journey coming down from Brazil so it was very nice to show up and have a smooth check-in and have the good communication so timing is super crucial and

unfortunately your AI bot at least not yet isn't gonna know when your guest flight got delayed uh although you know that might be around the corner I am not saying that you're ever going to be able to replace your guest communication with bought but I do think it's going to be very helpful in the future there's a company called the guest Guru for example that's working on this at the moment I know there's probably a lot more I don't see it ever replacing our Communications our

guests experience team does an amazing job and a lot of things just happen and pop up that we can't really program in so even though AI might be helping us in the future we still got to make sure that our communication is great because if it's not what's going to happen we're going to get a ding and we're not going to get the five-star review that we need okay on to number three personal touches so if you've been in the short-term rental space for a while

and you've stayed in a lot of them you know that there's some properties you show up to and it just feels like you're showing up to some property that there was no care put into it it looks like someone opened a bunch of Ikea boxes and they just threw it up in a weekend that's not a super great experience right it's nice to have some some personal touches in there and there's several ways to do this so the first way you can do this is just

by leaving some little note leaving some food for example I know that some people leave wine but make sure that you're careful with those things because there are well first of all it's the drinking age you know if you're giving wine to someone that's not of age that could create an issue but there also may be some tax consequences if you're providing Hotel type amenities it may change your tax consequences so I am not a CPA but make sure you look into that so my host

left some goodies she left some bananas which I ate very quickly she also left some chocolates which I really wanted to eat very quickly but I know that one site one I'm gonna eat them all so I was proud of myself I hid them in a cabinet the whole trip actually I forgot about them it's crazy how when we don't see things in front of us we kind of forget about them sometimes so I don't buy them at home because I know that I can't control

my sweet tooth but that was a very thoughtful touch and especially after a long journey it was nice she also had bottled water and she also communicated that the things that she left there were free for me to use or consume and so great job with communication and great job with her personal touches another way that we can really win a lot of points with our personal touches are through our personal recommendations but remember as a host we don't always want to be constantly talking with

our guests and maybe bothering them in my situation for example I I don't know how long the flight was the two flights but it took a long time and I was tired a little bit of jet lag going on didn't really want to be exchanging a lot of messages and she did a good job at that at reading my communication level to make sure she wasn't sending too many when I wasn't sending hardly much at all so a good way that you can get recommendations out

without bothering your guests is through a guidebook we've talked about guidebooks a lot we use a digital version called hostfully but we also leave a printout in all of my properties and if you've just joining us for the first time on the show uh great to have you you can add to SDR riches and check out all of our past episodes I can't believe we're we're nearing in on 200 episodes it's just crazy but um I've got a portfolio they're built around the US now and

and also outside the US so five different markets two outside the U.S and almost 70 properties now so it's been an exciting Journey we've learned a lot so go back and check out some of those prior episodes if if you're just tuned in for the first time one you'll find on hostfully that's episode 31 believe it or not that was a long time ago but you know what this information lasts real estate investment fundamentals last their Evergreen and most of this and information is is still

very very relevant except for occasionally some software programs that maybe change or something like that I also talked about a way that you can get a guidebook for free by using notion which is arguably my favorite program I've ever discovered in the last couple years so check that episode out that's 127. there's really Endless Options with notion I use it for my personal life and also for my business Investment Portfolio all of that all of that actually my notes for these podcasts I use in notion

so check that one out that might be a free good option for you if you don't already have a digital guidebook so on to step number four we've made sure first step we have an accurate honest listing the second step we have excellent host communication and that is throughout the duration of the reservation from beginning to end number three personal touches we've added them wherever we can can we created a guidebook and our property doesn't feel like it was just opened up from a bunch of

Ikea boxes number four is location so yes sometimes by having the best location ever it kind of makes all the other things less important and so you know they say location location location location the same is true for short-term rentals again we're going to have this in our listing it's going to be very clear but if someone's in a fantastic location maybe where they're close to attractions all these things maybe they're not actually spending that much time in your property and the location makes it so

nice that they're going to leave you a five star review as long as you tick these other four boxes even if your property is a little older it maybe needs a renovation it has to be clean remember an older property can still get good reviews but it has to be clean if it's not clean or it doesn't feel clean you're not going to be getting excellent reviews one other quick thing just to add here is that if you have a guest that left you some sort

of feedback something that they didn't enjoy and you haven't fixed it yet well you need to fix it because guess what if one guest didn't like it other guests are not going to like it as well so really make sure that you're watching and reading the private feedback and making sure you got a close eye on your property the fifth thing that can really impact our reviews is the length of the reservation so let me explain here if you have a property where average night stays

one night that doesn't really give you a lot of time to show your great host communication it doesn't give the guests a lot of time to explore your property or maybe to explore your recommendations and so if they have one little thing that kind of goes wrong they might leave you a bad review just because they didn't have the opportunity to see your property shining in its best light and to see how you care as a host so the length of the reservation can really make

a difference can make a difference if it's much longer too right so the longer the reservation is the more opportunity we have to show our guests that we care again we don't want to be in their space or message them more than they're messaging us but we want to have excellent response times and we want to be there if they need us so reservation length can really make a difference too but it can also work against you right so if it's a longer reservation and you've

just dropped the ball in a couple places well then you might get a bad review from that too so just to recap we can have a property that is not perfect it maybe needs some Renovations it has to be clean remember that but as long as we're doing the following five things we can still get five star reviews every time the first thing we want to make sure that our listing is accurate and honest the second thing we want to make sure that we have excellent

guest communication every step of the way the third thing we want to make sure that we have some sort of personal touches and this could be your guidebook but you could go further than that as well and leave some items in your property or leave some sort of notes or something like that in your property so having some personal touches the fourth thing is if your property has a stellar location it might make some of these other things is a little less important but remember this

is an average of all of these things when your guests is staying with you they're not going to rate you just based on one thing you need to make sure that you're doing a good job at all these things the fifth thing is the length of reservation so if it's a one night reservation you don't have a lot of opportunity to let your non-perfect property shine uh you you just don't unfortunately but with a longer reservation you do so this is by no means an exhaustive

list of everything we need to do we've got almost 200 episodes in the past on all these little things that can really help us improve our property so go back and check those out I hope you've been enjoying the podcast if you didn't know yet we're also managing other people's properties and so we've managed gosh probably close to 30 000 guests now in my personal portfolio my team does an amazing job and we're partnering with specific partners that have properties that work well with our portfolio

so you can check that out at restmethods.com we've got a property management button there we also have a lot of my recommended resources and all kinds of content so thanks again for joining in love the feedback too if you guys have any questions or you have any specific topics you want to go over please let us know and until next time I hope you have a wonderful week Financial Freedom through short-term rentals what all starts with the properties you acquire but you want to make sure

that you acquire the right properties I want to give you my ebook that will show you how to do just that there is no charge it's my gift to you for being one of our subscribers just go to restmethods.com that's r e s t methods.com